Unpacking the Past in Wordless and Braided Comics: Contemporary Mizrahi Graphic Novelists and Traumatic Historical Memories

Abstract:This article analyzes approaches to familial and communal memory in Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Asaf Hanuka’s Hayehudi haʿaravi, two Mizrahi graphic novels published in 2020. Both make use of comics-specific modalities to communicate the struggles of contemporary Mizrahim who feel burdened and bound to a past of which the authors possess no memories. Isaacs’s employment of wordlessness as she navigates 1930s and 1940s Jewish Baghdad facilitates an immersive sensory experience that enables her to extract meaning from the past and locate it in Mizrahi life in the present. Hanuka uses “braiding,” a concept described by Thierry Groensteen to refer to the complex interweaving of visual and linguistic narratives across a work, to link his own life story with the stories of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Doing so allows him to understand the ways in which his own life has paralleled his ancestors’ choices while leading him to make changes in order to avoid repeating their mistakes. Considered together, both artists model creative approaches to navigating the Mizrahi past and present and modelling ways to create a cohesive Mizrahi identity in the twenty-first century.